November 29-December 5, 2008 Edition

Rails 2.3 development is still continuing at a healthy clip. Here’s an overview of what’s happened this week.

Application Templates

Rails now incorporates Jeremy McAnally’s rg application generator. What this means is that we now have template-based application generation built right into Rails; if you have a set of plugins you include in every application (among many other use cases), you can just set up a template once and use it over and over again when you run the rails command. Pratik Naik provided a thorough writeup of this feature over on his blog. commit

Find Improvements

Even the venerable code used by Active Record to talk to databases can be improved, and we had a couple of improvements checked in this week. First, the SQL generated for preloading records in has_and_belongs_to_many associations has had an extra “AS” excised, which makes it work better with some databases. Also, we now have a :having option on find (as well as on has_many and has_and_belongs_to_many associations) for filtering records in grouped finds. As those with heavy SQL backgrounds know, this allows filtering based on grouped results:

Rack Integration

The tighter integration of Rails with Rack continues. This week saw the death of the venerable CGI processor within Rails, as well as the use of Rack to handle FCGI. There was also some refactoring down in the Rails tests to make them play nicer with Rack. commitcommit

Configuration File Cleanup

Over the years, the default environment.rb file had gotten a bit cluttered with comments, random documentation, and settings that mot people don’t need. DHH took a few minutes to clean up the mess, and the current state of this file is much leaner. As part of the cleanup, session store configuration has been moved out to its own file. commit

No More Process Scripts

If you’re one of the (fairly rare) Rails developers who deploys in a fashion that depends on the inspector, reaper, and spawner scripts, you’ll need to know that those scripts are no longer included in core Rails. For Rails applications that are reployed with current alternatives like Passenger, these are just unnecessary baggage. But if you need them, you’ll be able to pick up copies via the irs_process_scripts plugin. commit

Odds and Ends

The fact that Rails checks for IP spoofing can be a nuisance for sites that do heavy traffic with cell phones, because their proxies don’t generally set things up right. If that’s you, you can now set ActionController::Base.ip_spoofing_check = false to disable the check entirely. commit

Rails.root now returns a Pathname object, which means you can use it directly with the join method to clean up existing code that uses File.join. commit

ActionController::Dispatcher now implements its own middleware stack, which you can see by running rake middleware. commit